Iran Releases Video Of Captured US Drone Plane
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
* Intercept the control signal
* Decrypt it somehow (in a short period of time)
* Jam (from the ground) the US signal going to the plane, while not jamming themselves (equally unlikely)
* Give the proper C&C commands to the plane to land
Or the more likely scenario of the plane malfunctioned (it is a test plane being used in production) and landed itself.
My biggest concern would be if the self-destructs onboard fired as they were supposed to.
The only possible scenario I see where they actually managed to take control of it is if they have good inside information. That's not impossible, of course, but then they wouldn't give it away like that.
* majority of technology in US is outsourced to China / India
* China is a good friend of Iran and India has a very close relationship
* some info about technology might be passed to Iran
And joke is: when they open the drone, they will see "made in China" sign somewhere.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2058849/Chinese-coun...
Also, it seems highly likely that most US secrets including drone control systems are likely to have been compromised by hackers.
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/chinese-hackers-took-...
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-04-21/us/pentagon.hacked_1_plan...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/world/middleeast/18drones....
Similar possibility without actual hacking of C&C channel encryption is that the drone (or its windows command machines in Nevada) is just plain infected with a drone virus (like it was recently reported) which has a code "if (it is a steath drone flying over Iran) then (land)"
so, operator behind windows machine can issue a command to the drone using keyboard/joystick/mouse attached to that machine, yet virus residing in the same machine can't? How come? Does the drone recognize received commands as issued by virus vs. issued by operator ? By smell or a smily at the end or the word "Please" at the start of the command :)
I can imagine a number of potential scenarios for bringing down an aircraft like this, ranging from full control takeover to interruption of communication until fuel exhaustion and partial crash.
Or perhaps we've bugged it and let them have it. Think we might want to know where they'd take something like this?
1. they jam the control signal and the drone goes into safe mode, tries to return to base.
2. Now, let's also jam the GPS signal with fake information to distort the earth's map so that it thinks that the base is somewhere inside Iran.
3. Show pretty pictures to the press with the intact drone.
I think I saw some movie about this
I guess you could do it if you had actual atomic clocks sending precisely-calibrated signals made to look like the satellites were wherever you wanted them to be. Still, I guess it would be pretty hard to jam the actual satellites, since you'll also be jamming your own signal.
I should have used a different word than jamming for the GPS map distortion, since it might imply that I was referring to sending random gibberish, so wikipedia to the rescue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaconing
Now, knowing that DGPS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DGPS) is pretty common, I don't see where's the difficulty on sending a fake signal in the GHz range, more powerful than the weak one coming from the km high satellites.
Considering that some(most?) drones send their return video in the clear, I wouldn't be surprised if the GPS systems end up being not properly engineered to handle this scenario.
You can (apparently) get a developer kit for STANAG 4586 for the low low price of € 9 900.00. Not like the diy drone stuff, this is a kit based on the NATO spec for participating on a UAV's control network. This is like 5 minutes and google. an organization with the resources of a nation behind it could probably get farther.
First off the colors are wrong, the coating on an RQ170 is black/grey its not painted because painting it changes its radar reflection signature.
Second we don't see the bottom of the drone, if we did there would be either landing gear (if they managed to get it to actually land, or a scraped up bottom) According to Lockheed the drone lands when it runs out of gas and it does so with the landing gear retracted to avoid damage.
We don't see any armaments, where are the two hellfire missiles it keeps in its belly?
The shape of the motor nacelles is wrong. At least they aren't the same as every other photo of the RQ170.
Not sure what the game here is, but what this video shows is not an RQ170, of that I am certain.
To me, it looks like a rushed mockup designed from existing images for a press event:
- The wing seams are jacked up for a low observable airframe, though this could be because they disassembled it prior.
- The inlet grill configuration is an odd design for low observability and looks like it would significantly block airflow, but this is a low speed aircraft.
- The paint job is odd. Birds are always being repainted all kinds of crazy schemes, but I've never seen this kind. The body does look like it was crated with aircraft metal, though.
I'm willing to bet the original crashed and burned and that this is a mockup. Iran doesn't have the resources to land one of these intact, themselves. Neither does China or Russia.
this is after falling from 20km height after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. Would be enough to produce a very closely resembling mockup :
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/history/u2/u2-wreckage....
>Iran doesn't have the resources to land one of these intact, themselves.
Pretty much the same believe was held about Soviet Union surface-to-air capabilities before the U2 incident (and the belief was true right to exactly the point of the accident as it did took 14 missiles to score the hit)
I didn't say it was impossible, considering they likely have support from China and possibly Russia. It's just highly, highly unlikely in my opinion. And they're not going to just "jam" GPS and make it think an Iranian airport is it's home base. It doesn't work like that.
This is either a super fancy way of getting a new version of Stuxnet into Iranian research facilities, or a proxy play to deliver crippled/broken stealth technology to China.
Something ain't right.
I highly suspect the drone was either operating inside Iran, or close enough to its borders that the US didn't want to risk sending an F-16 after it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
The US has the means to destroy it if they choose to - the Iranians can't stop a cruise missile or a stealth bomber. It was a political calculation NOT to destroy it.
They absolutely have the means. Good friends of mine ran intercept and recovery operations in Afganistan and Iraq. Further I agree completely that it was a political calculation. The risk of flying a fighter (it would be near impossible to retask a bomber or cruise missle into the role) and a recovery team into Iran's borders was way higher than the risk of them recovering anything sensitive.
This is just trying to catch people's attention and make Iran seem like a powerful country and a threat, and trust me the only people falling for it are the blind followers of mainstream news. No Iranian believes any of this.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/drone-virus-nuisance...
This could make an understanding of the drone's C&C structure by Iran much more of a feasible possibility. I have no idea if these really are connected but it was the first thing that came to mind reading about this story.
"BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim."
If this is true, how on earth did they manage to take control of the plane ? Surely a top secret drone would have significant defenses against precisely this kind of attack.
// bill: don't be so paranoid -mgmt
//if (inIran && lost_tether) nosedive();
if (lost_tether) find_a_nice_flat_place_to_land();
It's stealth, so they shouldn't have been able to track it. It's encountering this over enemy airspace, so it should interpret this as an attack. The untethered drone has a few options: (a) fly east, (b) self-destruct, or (c) land.
It's bizarre that it chose to land under those conditions.
Of course there are defenses against this sort of thing. Are they effective and comprehensive? Unless the system has been under months of public scrutiny, that's unlikely.
Cyber attacks, stealth-penetrating radar, etc. seem unlikely.
Until there are real facts, maybe Occam's razor is the best course. The simpler explanation is that the drone just malfunctioned.
In any case, http://www.google.ca/search?q=avtobaza+iran
> stealth-penetrating radar
You might want to look up an incident in Serbia where the stealth jet was in fact downed that way (a bit more complicated that just a radar, but it was still tracked along the sky from the ground through electronic means).
Zoltan [the Serbian battery commander, whose missiles downed an American F-16, and, most impressively, an F-117] used the human spotters and brief use of radar, with short range shots at American bombers. The SA-3 was guided from the ground, so you had to use surprise to get an accurate shot in before the target used jamming and evasive maneuvers to make the missile miss. The F-117 he shot down was only 13 kilometers away.
Zoltan got some help from his enemies. The NATO commanders often sent their bombers in along the same routes, and didn't make a big effort to find out if hotshots like Zoltan were down there, and do something about it. Never underestimate your enemy.
My question is this: How do we even know that's a working drone? It would take a competent body and fender guy less than a week to fabricate and paint a 1:1 model of the exterior of one of these drones.
i hope the CIA didn't forgot to put the virus carrying USB stick into the weapons bay :)
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...